For anyone that has ever played World of Warcraft during non-peak hours you unfortunately know that the PvP battlegrounds are rarely, if ever, open during that time. Two days in a row where I've just wanted to hit the battlegrounds for an hour or two has resulted in the following... two hour waits for nothing. Both days I waited from about 7 am EST until 10 AM EST and not one Alterac Valley or Warsong Gulch opened. This is not a limited occurrence to two days either. This is a normal occurrence on Azgalor and most other servers during the weekdays.
Battlegrounds normally do not open until after 6 pm EST on Azgalor and even then you have to be one of the lucky people who were already standing in line since 4 pm to get in. The battlegrounds usually remain open well into the night and about midnight is when they start closing up.
So for gamers like me all the previews in the world can't sell me on Arathi Basin. Outside of the first couple of days I will never see this battleground. Plus with the 1.7 inclusion of battleground holidays rewarding ONLY players who get to play at prime time, there is once again no point in me trying to compete in the PvP ranks.
I make limited gains and put in 3x the amount of work to get my honor. I have to do it the good ole' fashioned way. Ride out to enemy lands and hunt them down. Three hours results in maybe 30 HK's. Three hours in a battleground for random newb #1 results in 100's of HK and 1,000's of bonus honor. This needs to be fixed.
And here is the fix, thanks to Dark Ages of Camelot. When DAoC servers started having severe population imbalances and PvP combat was becoming few and far between Mythic decided to cluster servers together, but only their PvP combat areas. Now 3-5 servers are joined together and share PvP areas.
WoW needs to do the same with battlegrounds. Combine 3-5 servers and have the battlegrounds pull people from each one. This way if there is 1-2 people waiting in line at 2 am in the morning 5 servers will combine to make 10. What a brilliant idea! The coding can not be that hard and it makes complete sense. Give everyone equal chance to compete in PvP ranks regardless of whether they are logged in at prime time or not.
Oh and remove the battleground holiday, as it insults the non-peak hour gamer.
Update: 6 Sept, 2009 - Edited post and applied labels.
Well think of it this way. Those playing during prime time inside the BGs get 10x more honor than those of us who don't get to play in the BGs.
ReplyDeleteIn reality we are already competing on two different levels. I rely solely on real world PvP... not BG PvP for my honor. The rare morning BG is just that... RARE.
Lets not kid ourselves... the ladder system is more about time spent in BGs than anything. Without BGs open you can't compete... AT ALL.
Giving the off hour crowd the same EQUAL chance to compete will go a long ways to making the game better.
I think the weekends is just what BG needs to get more people interested/hooked...great idea
ReplyDeleteOnly if they are offered to everyone that plays at any time...
ReplyDeleteHonestly the BG honor is out of control as it is. Giving more honor is not going to attract more people because the same things that are driving people away from BGs are still there.
Balance, population imbalance, exploiters, and lame tactics are what are driving away people from BGs. If they were avoiding them before... no amount of honor will draw them back.
And this holiday just pisses people off who don't get to play during them.